Maureen Ryan: 'The Walking Dead' Finale Recap: The Best Episode Since The Pilot?

Note: Do not read on if you have not watched the Season 2 finale of AMC's "The Walking Dead," entitled "Beside the Dying Fire."

The first two acts of "The Walking Dead" Season 2 finale were full of excitement, honest to God suspense and characters who came up with pretty decent plans on the fly. When the braaaains finally hit the fan at Hershel Greene's farm, my pulse quickened and I found myself wondering and even caring about the survival of characters who'd done little more than irritate me for weeks. Hell, I even gave a crap about Hershel himself. As he pumped that rifle and mowed down walkers on his front lawn, he finally became a resolute character worth investing in.

Where has this show been for the past half year?

I mean, for more than a third of the season finale, nobody had a philosophical conversation or stood around debating what to do next. People killed freakin' zombies. They killed a lot of zombies.

Not that I'm saying that the show should have always stuck to a regime of all action and no philosophizing, but if you had told me that the spare, lean, almost wordless saga we saw in "The Walking Dead" pilot would morph into the talkiest talkfest this side of "Dr. Phil," I would have assumed that a horrible mutated virus had invaded your brain. The tense pilot was so judicious in its use of everything -- visuals, dialogue, music, zombie ultraviolence -- that an overstuffed, sludgy version of "The Walking Dead" didn't seem possible then.

At its best, as it was at times in its first season, "The Walking Dead" has used potent visuals, effective music and tense situations to reveal character through action. At its worst -- as it was for much of the first half of the second season -- it showcased a bunch of bland, uninteresting people repeatedly making dumb decisions and yammering until you wanted somebody to munch their limbs, just to shut them up.

Granted, the second half of Season 2 made me want to throw things less than the first half, but it was a long, slow climb from the morass of "Pretty Much Dead Already" to what we finally witnessed in Sunday's well-constructed season finale. Too often in its second season, "The Walking Dead" revisited the same old topics again and again and drained scenes and storylines of subtlety by being obvious and contrived. We often talk about whether we like TV characters enough to follow their exploits, but "The Walking Dead" made me realize how important respect is when it comes to my ongoing interest in a drama. If I can't respect a character's decision-making and/or motives, it's all but impossible for me to get behind them and root for them to achieve their individual or group goals. Like the man said, "You can't fix stupid."

Despite some improvements and despite the happy dance I did when Shane, at long last, died (Oh happy day! The least subtle, most irritating character on the show was finally gone), I still wondered if "The Walking Dead" was fixable.

Having now watched the Season 2 finale, which did a lot right and not much wrong, I'm not as worried as I had been.

You can't say anymore that Rick is a spineless leader. In fact, the second half of the episode was a rather masterful exploration of the following idea: Be careful what you wish for. Despite Andrew Lincoln's committed, earnest performance, it's been rather easy to mock Rick's contradictory impulses and his often stunning naivety. For instance, "Nebraska" featured the great scene of Rick coolly facing down two strangers in a bar, but that was followed by Rick's decision to try to reason with the dead Dave's unfriendly pals. Everybody on "The Walking Dead" did dumb things now and then, but Rick's status as putative leader made me roll my eyes even more at his sillier notions.

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Maureen Ryan: 'The Walking Dead' Finale Recap: The Best Episode Since The Pilot?